Nicholas C. Rowley

SAN FRANCISCO - Nicholas C. Rowley is the founder of the national plaintiffs firm Trial Lawyers for Justice and a former name partner at Carpenter, Zuckerman & Rowley.

Raised in Iowa, he put himself through law school at the University of LaVerne. "I lived in my car when I started law school," he said. Admitted to the State Bar in 2002, his firm's website now boasts of billions of dollars in wins for wrongful death, medical negligence, serious injury and civil rights clients.

Rowley and his wife and law partner, Courtney E. Rowley, opened Trial Lawyers for Justice in 2008. He said it was his frustration with the disparity between the medical malpractice awards he could achieve for clients in his home state and elsewhere and those limited by California's cap on medical damages that drove him to a reform effort that succeeded this year.

"I've won multiple eight-figure cases in states with no caps," he said. "In California, you could put $100,000 into some of these cases to do them right and the clients end up with nothing."

Rowley authored and partly funded the Fairness for Injured Patients Act, a ballot initiative that, if passed, would have raised the longstanding $250,000 cap on medical malpractice claims to over $1 million. He used the threat of a costly ballot fight to help bring opponents to the negotiating table.

"I went through two years of fighting for this," Rowley said. He credited the Consumer Attorneys Association of Los Angeles and Consumer Watchdog as his close allies.

"We went to Sacramento, to the dragon's lair behind enemy lines, to meet with our opponents in the Legislature and the insurance industry and we listened to each other," Rowley said. The result was AB 35, a compromise bill that updates the Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act of 1975 to raise the cap on noneconomic medical malpractice damages in a series of steps--rising to $350,000 to start with $40,000 annual increases over the coming decade. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the measure in May.

"Now it's worthwhile for lawyers to take these cases," Rowley said. "The numbers will go up to $4.5 million in 10 years with attorney fees at one-third across the board."

He foresees useful collaborations between plaintiffs' attorneys and medical professionals. "We have really buried the hatched; we're not on opposite sides anymore. We're going to do a lot of good work moving forward together. We're already talking about a collaborative 'just culture' act which is going to improve safety and accountability in medicine."

Rowley added that he's not interested in praise. "Accolades? I don't really care. I'm just glad we got this done."